A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex

What the hell is Polymorphism?

Polymorphism has the funkiest name and is my favourite aspect of OOP. If done correctly you will feel like a proper genius.

Originating from Greek words, polymorphism more or less means “many forms”. This gives away very little unless you know polymorphism quite well but essentially polymorphism describes the ability of a type e.g. a set of differing Apex classes, to be used in similar ways without knowing much about those classes. An immediate example on the platform is the Type.format() static method available on Integers, DateTime, etc**. Although each of the Types represents something different this method does a similar thing for each i.e. turns them into a String but does this in a different way for each type. Which brings me to a definition of Polymorphism:

Polymorphism describes a pattern in object-oriented programming in which classes have different functionality while sharing a common interface.

Let’s take this academic statement and make it more concrete by looking at an example.

**I’ve assumed that these “primitives” are subclasses of a shared superclass or implementations of a shared interface.

How do we implement Polymorphism?

Polymorphism in Apex requires an Apex Interface to be implemented or Class that can be extended by other Apex classes e.g. Virtual or Abstract classes. The implementing or extending classes can then be used in a predictable, consistent way even though their types are different from one another. Time for an example.

Imagine that we need to display the original price and discounted price for a set of completely different products. We want to use a single Visualforce table to do this and with the bare minimum of VF code whilst modelling these products in a reusable and extensible way. We start off by defining an interface like so:

public interface Product {
/**
Any class that implements this interface must
have methods with the following signatures
**/
Decimal getDiscount();
Decimal getPrice();
String getName();
}

Any class that implements this interface has to implement methods that match the two method signatures that have been defined.

Now we create two categories of products, one for fruit and the other for finance.

Notice that these classes both implement the same interface and therefore some of their methods have the same signatures. However the calculation of the discount is different in each class! As the author of these classes the inner workings of the getDiscount methods could do anything that you can imagine – they could use other classes and methods, make web service callouts etc. without impacting their intended polymorphic behaviour.

But how will we use two different types of Apex class in one VF table? The answer is in their Polymorphic capabilities! So how can we apply this? Let’s start with the page.

Looking inside the controller we see that the list allProducts is of type Product which isn’t a class but an interface. By doing this we are saying, “create a list that is able to contain any instantiated Apex class that implements the Product interface” i.e. the list can hold any Financial or Fruit Product, or in fact any other class that might later be created that implements this interface. The cool thing is that our Visualforce page (or developer) doesn’t have to know the exact type of class that’s being passed, all it knows is that a particular method will be available for it to call. This is very powerful and is a common use for polymorphism.

Another common use is within ISV applications that need to be extensible. Such an application might provide several interfaces that an external person/company could implement to extend the application’s functionality. For example, the application may have a set of interfaces that describe a particular way of creating classes that allow the external party to implement a custom outbound (from SFDC) integration from within the app. This way the creators of the ISV app don’t have to code every conceivable integration into their app but instead allow others the ability to do this without exposing the inner workings of their app to the world!

Why Should I Use Polymorphism?

Polymorphism is amazingly powerful once you’ve got the hang of it. It requires you to plan your application in a fair amount of detail and results in code that is loosely coupled, easy to extend, faster to write and generally more robust. As if that wasn’t enough it also makes you feel really smart!

This concludes the series on object-oriented programming and I’m sure that I’ve raised more questions than provided answers. The topic is huge and I encourage you to grab a book on OOP because it is key to becoming an expert software developer no matter which language you use.

If you’d like a bit more info on the topic of OOP and are around for DF14 look out for my talk where I’ll work through an example of applying OOP to code when connecting to external APIs.

A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex

What the hell is Abstraction?

Abstraction is a very interesting and surprisingly simple concept. At its core it’s about context and if Abstraction were a company it’s motto would be “Provide the right tools and data at the right time.”. There are many analogies in the “real world” e.g.

The Force.com Platform is an abstraction of the complex, underlying hardware and software that provides us with a simplified set of tools that can achieve the same level of benefit as those complex, underlying hardware and software!

A technical architect and developer both experience the creation of software but the developer’s perspective is far more detailed and requires different knowledge and tools. A technical architect has a different perspective and usually is not interested in the same information and tools that the developer needs. The detail of the developer’s work is abstracted from the technical architect although they will have a higher-level understanding of the same applications.

The driver of the car has a very different perspective (interface, information, goals, tools) than the engineer of the same car. Imagine if you had to know how all the parts of a car work together in order to drive! Those details are abstracted from the driver.

Where is this applicable to developers on the platform? Ever created a Visualforce component or Apex utility class? Well you my friend you are already using abstraction!

This sounds a lot like Encapsulation!

Abstraction and Encapsulation go hand in hand but they are different. Encapsulation is one of the ways you can achieve abstraction but does not encompass the entire concept. As stated previously Encapsulation is about hiding data and logic-implementations whereas Abstraction is described as providing the appropriate perspective to the appropriate consumer.

How do we Abstract?

There is a lot that is already abstracted on the platform e.g.

The declarative features of the platform abstract the complexity that you would have to employ in order to replicate them through code.

The mechanisms for CRUD access to data are abstracted through SObjects (using a technique called ORM) in order to simplify this access.

Apex and Visualforce give you the ability to encapsulate and abstract complexity and expose this to consumers (other code and/orwebservices) through simplified interfaces.

These abstractions can be very sophisticated as has been shown several times on Andy Fawcett’s blog e.g. the domain, selector and service layer patterns in this repo provide patterns that allow the implementor to create simple mechanisms to connect and exercise complex logic. Those that use this logic need not be aware of the complexity contained beneath.

So how do you use abstraction? This is a topic that could take a year at University to teach but let me provide two examples, one simple and another more complex.

1. Simple Example

Calculating the area of a circle requires some specialised knowledge so you may want to create an abstraction of this calculation i.e. give other developers a way to calculate the area of a circle without having to know the actual calculation.

2. Complex Example

This example works at a higher level of abstraction than the previous one (pretty meta huh?) but the concept is similar. A developer creates a class (or set of classes) that contain all of complex business logic for the marketing department (this might be called your Service Layer if you were layering your application logic). This logic is then consumed by several other platform components such as trigger handlers, page controllers and bulk apex classes. The class methods and properties expose simplified interfaces to this logic and the details of the logic are abstracted from the consumers.

The benefit of abstraction here is that (in theory) you don’t need understand the details of the logic within the business logic classes you just need to understand their general purpose, know the method signature for the appropriate method and if necessary pass it the right data to get the expect result. And

Why Should I Use Abstraction?

If you’re a developer – much as with Encapsulation – you’ve probably been using Abstraction without even knowing it. The benefits are that by employing abstraction you’re making things easier for you and your team by presenting only the relevant information and tools at the appropriate time. This means a less confusing world, so less time is spent comprehending an application, fewer errors are made and everyone is happier.

Next time I’ll talk about my favourite part of these OOP principles, Polymorphism. It’s more than just a fun word to say!

A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex

What the hell is Encapsulation?

Encapsulation isn’t a tricky concept in itself but some confusion does arise from it’s close relationship with Abstraction (to be covered in my next post). Broadly it is defined as one of, or both of the following:

An information hiding mechanism.

A bundling of data and methods that operate on that data.

These are pretty abstract statements but in reality are very simple. I will demystify them with examples below but for now let’s use an analogy:

Imagine you have a watch (or if you have one just consider it, don’t worry about the imagining part) that tells you the date and time. You can adjust the date and time using buttons/knobs/switches but you have no idea what happens inside the watch, just that it results in the date and time changing. You have some data (the date and time), you have some methods to operate on that data (buttons/knobs/switches) and there is a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that you don’t know about (and it’s better that way, imagine you had to adjust all those bits and pieces yourself).

Apex has come a long way in the past few years, and as Salesforce has grown so has the number of super smart people working on the platform. There are lots of guides on how to do fancy things using JavaScript, Apex and Visualforce as well as many more whitepapers on the topics of governances and standards. However I think there is a gap, and I’d like to plug it.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be releasing articles that describe and show the basics of object-oriented programming (OOP) with Apex. My approach will be to make these articles as modular and simple as possible. The target audience? Developers with a-teeny-bit-of-experience through to those who have tons of experience but never had any formal training in OOP.

A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex

What the hell is OOP?

Good question, and although many agree on some elements of OOP there is still a divergent view in the details. Contrasting it to what came before helps though.

The programming paradigm prior to OOP essentially had everyone writing code as your would an essay i.e. a single long text with one line written (and executed) after the other. There were no classes, no methods, no GOTO statements even (if you go far back enough that is). If you needed the same complex calculation in 5 parts of your application you had to write it 5 times. This is obviously a bad idea and over time the geniuses that created computer programming started inventing bits and pieces of engineering to make it easier to create, maintain and extend their code. Collectively, these features together with their experience were the beginnings of OOP.

The most commonly cited features of OOP are described below.

Encapsulation

A way to hide state (or private data), but also – confusingly – a way to bundle data and capabilities to operate on that data.

As an example consider a sausage making machine, you pour some stuff into one end and get sausages out of the other without needing to know the internal workings. The inner workings are encapsulated within the machine.

Abstraction

This is one of the trickiest concepts because it is relative, you can have levels of abstraction and it essentially means providing the appropriate level of information and data at the requested level.

With my previous example, if you are the sausage maker then you just need to know what stuff to insert into which part of the machine. But, if you were the sausage machine repair man you would need to have the tools, knowledge and access to all the bits and bobs inside of the machine. These are different levels of abstraction.

Inheritance

A controversial aspect since some languages think that inheritance is bad. In short it is the capability of a class or object to have certain methods and attributes passed down to them through a hierarchy.

Now that I’ve started the sausage story I can’t stop! All sausages share certain qualities e.g. they’re all encased in something, have some type of contents and (usually) need to be cooked before being eaten. You could represent these common attributes in a parent class and have specific types of sausages (pork, chicken, blood pudding) “subclass this superclass” i.e. inherit from it.

Polymorphism

Polymorphism is extremely rewarding when you get it right because it just feels smart. In short it allows you to define ways of dealing with data without knowing exactly how that data will be defined in the future.

To finish off the sausage story (anyone else hungry?) you could put any type of meat into the machine but in the end you will still always get a sausage i.e. provided that a certain type of input (any type of meat and spice) is provided to the machine it “knows” what to do with it (make delicious sausages) even though the types of sausages may have differences.

Don’t worry if these concepts haven’t clicked just yet, each will be covered in detail in future posts.

These concepts are obviously academic and language agnostic but Apex makes them available to you through the constructs of classes, methods and attributes of those classes, instances of those classes.

A note on terminology. In the Salesforce world an Object is most commonly used to refer to a data entity e.g. Account or CustomObject__c. In the OOP paradigm an Object is an instance of a Class i.e. MyClass.cls is an Apex class which provides the blueprint for instances of itself. This becomes clearer with an example:

MyClass myObject = new MyClass();
myObject.divideByZero();

MyClass is the class, and myObject is an instance of that class AKA an object. Got it? Great.

Why Should I Use OOP?

Because it will make you a better programmer and it doesn’t hurt with the ladies/men (delete as appropriate). Your code will be better, you will end up doing less boring work and it will be easier (and quicker) to fix bugs. I guarantee it.

Next Time on Th3Silverlining

My next post will delve into the feature called Encapsulation so hit the subscribe button to find out when it’s published. See y’all then.

It is a facet of OOP and can best be described using the good ol’ example of the ‘Shape’ class problem (thanks Java!). Let’s suppose we’d like to create an application that drew a number of shapes on a page. At the time of analysis we know that we want to immediately support circles, but to future-proof our application we need to support the drawing of any shapes. Being Pretty Darn Good Developers(tm) we realise we should create a Shape class that has a single method used to draw itself, and any specific shapes should be derived from this class, and override that method. Make sense? Didn’t think so. Read the rest of this entry »

Being a mathematician, equations like those in the title usually make me wanna poke someone in the eye.. but in this case it’s just too true to not use. My aim over the next two posts is to provide you with the knowledge to,

Consume web services from within the Force.com platform(without WSDLs).

Use web services(we’ll be using the SOAP-based variety), or other agents, as data sources for integration with JavaScript, and in particular, jQuery.

I will cover point 1 in this post, and then bring it all together in a second post which will cover point 2. It’s gonna be a rocky ride, but I’m sure all you cowboys/girls/others can handle it. Just so we know where we want to end up, our final product will look something like this,

Can I get a OOP OOP?! That’s right folks, OOP is alive and well on the Force.com platform, and over the past few months I’ve had some pretty thrilling experiences implementing projects using those trusted sidekicks Encapsulation, Polymorphism and trusty ol’ Abstraction. There is some pretty sweet documentation on the subject, but I thought I’d demo something supercool I learnt by combining two articles from the Force.com wiki. Read the rest of this entry »

Salesforce Handbook

Jeff Douglas and I have recently completed our comprehensive guide to salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform. The book targets both developers and administrators who use the platform, or are looking to get into it. For more information feel free to peruse the listing by clicking on the button below.